


being, becoming

by sciencebutch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Angst, Gen, POV Alternating, Unnatural History - Freeform, au where griffin succeeds in altering the doctors biodata, so he turns human
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-26
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:29:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26658976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sciencebutch/pseuds/sciencebutch
Summary: Griffin pours the golden vial, his revision, into the Doctor's biodata, and the Doctor turns human.Well, "turn" is the wrong word to use, really, because the Doctor had always been human.
Relationships: The Doctor & Fitz Kreiner, The Doctor & Sam Jones
Comments: 7
Kudos: 5





	being, becoming

**Author's Note:**

> i finished unnatural history like 30 minutes ago and i had to write this because iwas liek oi3hoiqhoh349t8oeriu

The Doctor doesn’t exist.

Except he does.

Except he doesn’t, not as I know him at least. He’s standing before the closed-up scar, the second and fourth and sixty-ninth dimensions around it knitted so tight it’s like it was never there to begin with.

Sometimes scars go away, if you’re lucky. This one had, but I sort of think it’s the opposite. Of lucky, that is.

The Doctor is looking down at his hands like he’d never seen them before.

His human hands.

I suppose he never has seen them before, ‘cause they were Time Lord, or whatever, the last time he’d looked close.

Doctor John Bowman doesn’t recognize his hands. There’s a callous on the middle finger of his right hand from the decades of holding a pencil in a knot-tight grip, and his nails are all bitten to the quick. It isn’t right, he thinks. They should be soft and smooth, no bumps or hangnails.

Besides, he thought he preferred his left hand.

I wonder what it’s like to grow an extra heart. Probably something like when you’re stoned and your chest is pounding so hard you can’t even stand up without being out of breath. Maybe the opposite is what the Doctor feels now, now that there’s a lot more space in his ribcage.

Griffin’s still holding the glass vial, the one that had been full of the revision of the Doctor’s biodata, and I want to run at him and smash it out of his hands and pummel him into whatever dimension’ll bring him the most pain, twist his forearm round to his back till it creaks out of his socket, make him feel something like what he made the Doctor feel.

But he isn’t the Doctor anymore.

The Doctor never existed.

John Bowman crumples to the pavement, his hair dreadfully flat to his head and no longer floating in curious tendrils, his pulse dreadfully slow. He even _seems_ human, as if his aura had changed to something more palatable to brain. No longer was he unknowable, because Sam could look at him and feel like she already knew everything about him.

He’s bleeding, his face and hands and every uncovered bit of him is, since he’d fallen on the shards of glass that I had thrown down. Golden drops - my own revised biodata - seep up into his chestnut curls, putting some of the luster that used to be there back into them, as if his hair wanted to return to what it was.

“How could you,” I ask without really asking. There’s no question mark at the end, I think I’m too shocked to put one there.

“I fixed him. You’ll thank me for it later,” Griffin says, satisfied. He breathes in deeply, as if testing the air. “Already I can feel it: San Francisco is returning to normal.”

 _It never was normal,_ I want to say, but maybe it was because the Doctor isn’t there anymore and the universe seems a little more ordinary for it. It’s oppressive, almost, heavy like the smokey air in my bedsit. I wonder if I’ll have to go back there, now that the Doctor isn’t, well —

Griffin gets Fitz out, and I want to pay attention, I do, but I can’t help but stare at the Doctor - _but he isn’t the Doctor,_ I finally manage to think - breathing and bleeding on the tarmac. I hear Fitz choke out a couple heavy inhales at my left, and then the rest of the world leaves me and it’s just the not-Doctor and me, not-Sam (but maybe I _am_ Sam because without the Doctor would blondie really exist to begin with? Surprisingly, it doesn’t make me feel much better, the fact that it’s just me now that should exist.)

“Christ,” Fits pants. I don’t know if it’s from being free finally or at the not-Doctor’s body.

“He’s human,” I say.

“Huh?”

“Griffin turned him human. Never was a Time Lord to begin with. Biodata,” I explain in all broken up fragments like the glass digging into the not-Doctor’s skin.

“Christ,” Fitz says again, like a broken record.

Doctor John Bowman stirs, and finds that he’s bleeding, somehow. “I’m bleeding.”

He doesn’t feel the pain that he would expect, so he turns his color-blind gaze — he’s color-blind, but he’d always been color-blind, so why is it a surprise?— towards his hand and sees glass embedded in his palm. _Ah_. Glass never feels like how you’d expect it to, especially the small particulate bits. It doesn’t feel like anything, most of the time.

He picks the piece out and flicks it away. He still feels incredibly odd, like there’s something he’s missing.

“Doctor?” a man asks from behind him — Fitz. It’s Fitz, that’s right. His best friend.

“Doctor?” he questions, smiling, turning on his knees and ignoring the crunching of glass. “Why so formal, Mister Kreiner?”

“What?”

“What do you mean, what?” John Bowman laughs, his eyebrows downturning. Confused. “It’s John, Fitz. It’s always been John…are you quite alright?”

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on [tumblr!](%E2%80%9Ceightdoctor.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D)


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